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thepringlesofblood · 3 years ago

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heroforge hoes pt 2

this was really cathartic last time. I’m doing a shorter one now - miscellaneous guys + dimension 20 sidequest guys.

anyway, same deal, these are guys I made in heroforge and will take absolutely no criticism on, not a joke, i am sealing them away in the vault of widespread perception so I can stop obsessively editing them, so please do not correct/point out flaws no matter how well-meaning. i‘m doing this series for my mental health, not to be an artist.

as always, heroforge is a great service, when i bitch about them not having something it is with the greatest love and the understanding that it is a free service with no ads and limited staff, and also, as always, i will bring up the 21 kinds of eyebrow scars you can apply. you can hold both of these things in your hands at the same time.

links and screenshots. if the links broken and you wanna see a guy dm me

Athena Parthenos - this is specifically the iteration of athena represented by the giant ass statue that used to be in the parthenon but got looted by romans. yes i was a percy jackson kid. no this is not based in pjo/hoo canon. it is based on the nashville recreation of the parthenon and the athena parthenos inside it.

i couldn’t exactly put a smaller statue of nike on her hand so I went w the “summoned fairy” thing. they do give you the fuckin AEGIS with the gorgon face in it which is dope. it’s supposed to be leaning up against her and then she holds the spear straight up and down by her side, but I think I got pretty close. there’s also supposed to be a snake chilling by her side which is cool but no snake familiar :/ her dress is supposed to be just straight skirt right down to the ankles, but all the skirts they have are like weirdly puffy for the specific aesthetic we lookin for. I was very exited to make “the grey-eyed goddess” tho I love her.

i also took a shot at medusa. no option for snake hair (very understandable) but I did make her a naga!

the copper is only there for flavor bc no scale decals except for coral snake bands. this was the snakiest hair i could find and then put these two hat things that are squiggly and look snake-ish so it looks more alive. I think its a pretty good look. she’s a little fluorescent but this was before i really figured out the advanced levels of the coloration system. it still looks cool. also like i have always wondered exactly what medusa wears. she can’t go shopping, she can’t take clothes off of her victims bc they’ve been turned to stone. big brain take is that she’s naked but I figured since heroforge has like, a MILLION options to have ragged/dirty/torn clothes I’d use one of em. maybe the sails of the dead hero’s ship? that’s pretty metal.

I tried to think of what undertale character I could reasonably make (i did make sans but it was stupid easy and i don’t want to unleash him onto the universe) and the only other one I could imagine turning out well would be grillby, who I’ve always had a soft spot for

he is perfect. no complaints. 10/10 I love him.

I did stevonnie (riding “lion” (a pink warg)) from steven universe before I realized that the gem placement situation was going to be difficult with literally almost every character and decided to stop going down that particular road. I still think they look ok though. if you have Opinions about steven universe, don’t put them here. i do not care.

i reiterate: hf, let people hang onto the animals they are riding. pls.

also body hair decals would be great. i wanna give people leg hair!

ok onto d20 sidequest characters. ‘why only side-” its bc i have so many more for main quests i will have to split them up by arc

so. for tiny heist the only one I could really envision in hf was agnes (no cars, no legos clickos, bugs but not hercules beetles, if i can’t put bean in a full banana peel w a Q-tip is it even worth it, ti-83 maybe but the sized-up greebling wouldn’t really work)

agnes

so, you may ask, “thepringlesofblood, why is she in a wheelchair? that wasn’t in the campaign.”

so many things. this one was. hell. so, *mega spoilers for tiny heist* this is agnes near the end of her life, when she starts needing more support. i was going to do her in the hospital but idk if there’d be a hospital gown situation and i’m not about that *spoilers end*

so why did i make this wild creative choice?

this is what she looks like standing up

WHAT THE FUCK IS UP, HEROFORGE?

so in her official art, she has these iconic pink leopard-print leggings. and the only way I’d be able to do that is to make the leggings her actual legs, since you can’t put decals on clothes, but you can put them on bodies. so I gave her the “rosettes” decal and colored her legs pink. I figured I’d just make her lower half/legs slightly larger but. it didn’t work. the. the problem is the thigh gap. for me. itss. so big. and this is as thick as I could get her while still looking remotely proportional, bc the knees stay the same. the knees do not get bigger.

so whenever. you add weight. to the legs. it only makes the thighs and calves bigger. which is not how bodies work

i just. idk. why. its so hard to make fat people without making balloon animals, and i wasn’t even trying to make a fat person. in the official art agnes is fairly thin, with slightly thicker legs. i was just trying to make the legs a bit bigger to make up for the pants not being therebut. fuck. it don’t work.

the non-wheelchair options for sitting are barrel, rock, cargo crate, floor, and rough wooden chair, and she deserves something classier.

ok. to make up for dunking on hf so much for their body proportion issues, I will do 2 sincere compliments.

their wheelchair options are pretty solid. there’s “modern” “fantasy town” and “fantasy battle” and you can add/subtract handles and change the wheels. items equipped on the side don’t just clip through the chair, they get attached beneath the armrest. I’m not a wheelchair user so I’m no expert but it was refreshing at least.

the cigarette. so. what I did was i colored the end with fire, then put a decal of gray dustiness over is, so you can see the glow coming through it without it being really bright. it looks dope. that’s cool. thank u hf.

one surprising thing: there’s no basic “fairy” or “pixie” race. there’s a myriad of goblins, including “fairytale goblin” which is the skeleton i started from, but still. weird. plenty of fun wing options tho props.

also the big thing of powder is supposed to be fairydust - she needs some extra now that she’s getting older. or maybe rick’s been around. that color is one I basically created myself, I’m very proud of it.

finally we got lars vandenchomp from mice and murder

important note: how stupid they look is a feature, not a bug

so. they’re almost the only m&m pc i can do due to the varied furry natures of the characters (though hf is very accommodating to the furry community, they do not in fact have raccoons, owls, weasels, or pigs). I could do sylvester, they have a fox race, but after I made lars and gave them a lil fox familiar as a nod to sylvester I was like hmmmm nahhhh that’s sylvester now. hf’s “dog person” is VERY similar to lars’ doberman pinscher appearance and it worked out really well!

one thing that always bugged me w the official art for lars is that ally describes lars as wearing “a bright pink tuxedo” as like. one of their very first descriptors. and the official d20 art is like “ok we have an aesthetic going tho let’s tone it down to a gentle lavender” but that is just not the image i had in my head so I decided to restore them to their proper glory.

the main reason they’re leaping is bc when I did that pose the fox automatically changed into this caramelldansen-looking pose and that was too cute and too hilariously incongruous with sylvester’s character to pass up.

I also did garthy o’brien (who is in pirates of leviathan, a sidequest) but this post is long enough so I’ll do them on what will probably be a 2 part fantasy high post. also that’s where they originate from so it makes more sense.

ok. that’s enough for now. these creations are complete. i send them off into the vast panopticon of the internet. the ocd demon in me is slightly sated.

#cw mental illness #cw ocd #d20 #dimension 20 #grillby #undertale #stevonnie #you can use these if you want to #i have 0 opinion on the matter #tiny heist #mice and murder #heroforge #original post

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thevalleyisjolly · 4 years ago

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Dimension 20 Fandom and Diversity

Hey fellow D20 fans! I've been a D20 fan for a little while now, although I've only recently come back to tumblr. It's been great seeing all the wonderful fan content, the beautiful art, the heartbreaking fics, the deep meta and headcanons. There's so much creativity, and it's wonderful and inspiring to engage with. (For context, I am Chinese-Canadian) But I have noticed one thing, or rather, haven't noticed it. There have been four Asian cast members throughout the different seasons (Zac in the main cast, Erika Ishii, Rekha Shankar, and Lily Du in the side quests), and a lot of the time, fan content about their characters seem to go with "default white." Thankfully not with Ricky Matsui (although there's also a conversation there about recognizing the Japanese part of Japanese-American). But there seems to be a subconscious trend that with most of their characters not being human or human-looking, a lot of fan content treats them almost as default white, despite the fact that they're played by Asian actors. This isn't to say that people can't imagine Gorgug, Lapin, Cumulous, Lilith, Maggie, and TI-83 as white. They aren't explicitly Asian, or explicitly any human race (although Cumulous is part of House Rocks which is canonically black-coded - black Asians exist!), so it's all headcanon. Some of them even have official art that is white/white coded. But that’s what fans do, take canon and find new ways to engage with it! Given that the actors are Asian, it'd be really neat if there were more headcanons and more content where the characters were interpreted as explicitly Asian (especially the specific ethnicities of their actors, because Asia is not a monolith). There isn't a lot of positive Asian rep out there, especially in fantasy. Why not have more explicitly Asian content in fan spaces, where there’s so much room to engage with media? So this is some positive encouragement to D20 fans to start approaching those characters as more than “fantasy race defaults to white.” If fandoms can take white characters played by white actors and reimagine them as people of colour, it's definitely possible to take unspecified characters played by Asian actors and depict them as explicitly Asian. Again, there's nothing wrong with interpreting the characters in other ways, there are lots of different lived experiences among fans! It'd be really heartening though to see some more explicitly Asian representation in fan content. Asians are people of colour too, and we have so many stories to tell! There are so many different experiences across the whole breadth of the continent, from West Asians to East Asians to South Asians and all in between. And that's not even getting into trans-Pacific and immigrant experiences. There's a lot to explore, and it's worth it, I promise. (Anyone is free to interact, but please engage in good faith. This is a post for positive dialogue and encouragement!)

#dimension 20 #diversity in fan spaces #asian rep

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jostylr · 7 years ago

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What a year: 2017

This year has been a long year. Much of it centered on the national news. The anger and threats. The crumbling of icons to harassment. The feeling of powerlessness as the majority is ignored in the country. The non-stop desire to see what other embarrassment or trauma was in the news. None of that was good, but good did come out of it.

It was a year of endings for me and, in that ending, hope of new beginnings.

Apple

The only apple device I currently use that I used at the start of 2017 is my iPad Pro. In the spring of 2017, my 2009 iMac died (hard drive failure). It was a slow death which held the promise of maybe keeping it as a display monitor. I tried to use just my Macbook air and either use a dedicated external monitor or the 2009 iMac screen. Both ultimately ended in failure (the dedicated ones never looked good with the MBA while the iMac had catastrophic heat failure).

I ordered a new iMac in May, but they released a brand new version at WWDC. It was just within my return window so I returned the old new one and got a new new one. Been happy with it ever since.

My MBA died in November. It was working fine one moment and then it was dead the next. The repair would have cost more than a new refurbished one at MicroCenter (Apple no longer makes my beloved 11" MBA) and so I got that. Looked briefly at the Macbook but the keyboard felt like pounding on concrete.

iPhoneX came out and I just had to get it despite getting a lot of flack for paying so much for a new phone. I love it. I love the FaceID login flow, the smoothness of it all, the screen, and the camera is just fantastic. Low light, no problem. Crystal clear video. Cool zooming. I am not that much into taking pictures anymore, but this makes me wish I were. I might explore Halide a bit with it to learn more about digital photography. My daughter inherited my iPhone6; she was another motivation as her iPhone4S (my old one) died suddenly.

I bought the iPhoneX and the iPhoneSE for my wife using a tradeoff of a new carrier: Xfinity Mobile. We were paying $90 a month for AT&T. After our first month, we paid $25 for Xfinity Mobile, $12 for 1GB usage level (we used 200Mb) and $13 in taxes. The taxes are non-negotiable, but the $12 could disappear if we used less than 100Mb -- seems unlikely).

So in one year, I got a new iMac, MBA, and iPhone. If FaceID comes to the iPad and they redesign the Apple Pencil to have an eraser part, then I would consider replacing the iPad Pro too.

I also bought AirPods and absolutely love them. They can be a little slow to switch between devices, but otherwise, I am very pleased with them. Being wireless is incredible, and pausing when I take them out is a fantastic feature. I don't use the taps very much. The quality is fine for me and the range is great. Also, when they run low on power, I can charge one at a time. I don't often run out of power, but in the times I do, it comes in handy. I also enjoy sharing them with my wife when we are watching something together that is not intended for our daughter.

Apps

While speaking of Apple, there are a few apps that I find amazing to use:

Mac

Yoink. Drag and drop files onto the side, then find where to put them, drag them out. I find this works very well for me as I like to segment out my process in exactly this way: First find it, then figure out where to put it.

Grand Perspective. This is blowing my mind away. It can scan any folder (or the whole drive) and show in nested blocks the storage area. As one mouses over the blocks, it shows how much space and what file it is. This is a great way to get an understanding for where the space goes. Pretty too.

Magnet. Still early days for me, but this is a windows manager for snapping to a few specified areas using the keyboard. It seems to do exactly what I want though having a few more options would be very useful for me.

The indispensable apps I use all the time are, of course, MacVim, SourceTree (git), Terminal (ssh, literate-programming), 1Password, and the browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari). Some storage programs and some math apps are listed below.

I also acquired AffinityDesigner. It looks awesome and I hope to use it, but I have not yet had an opportunity to really delve into it.

iOS

To be honest, I have tried a number of apps, but there are not that many that really captures my attention. I continue to use SafariBooksOnline, Reeder, Firefox Focus, all for consuming.

Love you to bits. This is a graphical game that reminds me strongly of text-based games. My daughter and I both enjoyed playing through it. It is the spiritual successor to the much beloved (and gone) Tiny Thief.

GrafnCalc83. A wonderful touch implementation of the TI-83. I have the actual calculator, but the iOS version is a joy to work with while being very faithful to what the TI-83 would produce.

Many of the apps I come across seem to demo nicely (IKEA furniture placement app, for example), but I simply do not use that many despite having a lot of them.

I do use Notability for writing out notes on my iPad. It was particularly useful in conjunction with Screenflow in doing videos of working out mathematics problems.

I have also used AstroPad for converting my iPad into a graphics tablet for my desktop.

Storage

With all the failures of my devices this year, backup has certainly been on my mind. I had pretty good luck with them all except for my daughter's iPhone4S though I am not sure that there was anything much lost on it. Right now, I am using iMazing to do backups to an external drive connected to my iMac. They do it wirelessly to all the devices and this seems to be working fine.

For the desktop and laptops, I use Carbon Copy Cloner 5 and back the laptops up once a month. I also have Arq which backs up the high use folders (desktop, downloads, documents, my repositories) to OneDrive. Additionally, I have a main external storage folder that keeps a bunch of stuff, such as the photo library and I back that up to another external drive.

I just finished sorting all the many "messy desktop" folders all around and consolidating all the materials. Saw some interesting memories along the way, including my Tiddlywiki experiments. I have my OneDrive sync folder with a variety of documents that I find useful. I hope to keep it in sync with the folders on the main Storage device, probably using rsync.

Storage is still a bit of a pain, but I am hoping to work at it.

Currently, I have Amazon Cloud Storage and OneDrive. They are both very nice. I opted to not go with iCloud because I could not understand how to control what was syncing where. It sounded like they try to stuff my hard drives full and manage it. I am a big fan of having control even if it does cause me headaches of organization.

Jobs

My jobs have certainly changed a bit this year. I quit one part-time online teaching gig because I did not like the direction it was heading. I also wanted to have more time for other efforts. But another of my part-time online teaching gigs has been going crazy with enrollment so instead of 2 semesters, it looks like I will be teaching 3 semesters in the year.

I also left the neighborhood association. I am quite pleased to no longer be going to meetings.

My Arts&Ideas job also expanded to include a summer camp for our students. It went well and we expect to continue it. It is a very different feel, much more relaxed, but it also takes up a lot of time. I did feel that having limited free time helped keep me focused on working on what I was concerned with.

Healthcare

We have used CareFirst since going on our own about five years ago. We initially had $300-500 in premiums per month, but last year it spiked to $900 and now this year it would be $1500. This is insane given our income levels. So we switched to KaiserPermanente for about $500 a month after subsidies. I worry about the stability of the health system, but I guess we'll take it one year at a time.

This year, none of us needed medical help, that I can recall. In previous years, I had sicknesses and a surgery, but this year was a healthy year.

I did get a FitBit which has helped me stay motivated to move around. My weight is not moving in the direction I want it to, but it does seem at least stable. My goal is to lose about 30 pounds from where I am now.

Shoes and Sandals

This is the year when my feet stopped wanting to wear shoes. Shoes I have worn for a long time became uncomfortable. Perhaps my feet have gotten wider, perhaps I just have transferred my claustorphobia to my feet.

In any event, I started wearing sandals. All the time. Even with socks. To deal with weather, I have overshoes. One pair ($10) is for rain and light cold or snow. Another pair is expensive ($100) but are built for heavy winter use.

I have used both of them, I find them amazing. They look a little dodgy, but I love to wear my sandals and this is a neat separation of the external needs. The foot size of these overshoes are very large, but my feet are securely placed inside thanks to the sandals.

Inside, I have the comfort of open-toed sandaling.

RPG

Pushed by the students at Arts&Idea, I have been working on a new role-playing system based off of D&D. I call it self-directed role-playing. It takes the classes and breaks them up into individual skills. The system is complicated for the assignment of experience points and requires a computer. I also revamped the magic system to open it up to characters in a more general way. The combat is largely opposed rolls of attack versus defense. The initiative system is also computerized to allow for a dynamic ordering based on trying to make everyone feel like they are participating more (the less well one does or the more minor the action, the sooner one gets to play again; also defending slows one down a little as defending is rolling dice).

One neat feature (I hope) is that instead of a d20 for everything, the skills start at d4 and work up to d20, gaining modifiers at each level. Since attack and defense are opposed, this should balance out, regardless of how it goes, but I am hoping to reduce some of the random swings of fortune while still giving the thrill of rolling. The damage is a multiplier based on weapon and other factors, multiplied by how well one does in succeeding in the attack.

The biggest question is whether we can run this at a fast speed.

I hope this deals with the problems I have with D&D. The material is very nice and thorough, but the system has always felt not quite right. I have done some playtesting with a brave group of guinea pigs. In a week, I hope to begin two groups working through the prepared D&D adventures of Out of the Abyss and Curse of Strahd.

Fifth Staff

We spent the year at school looking to hire a fifth staff. It was quite a journey. We learned a lot, had a lot of fun with the Hiring Committee, and we finally did find someone that we are all very excited to join us.

But it is tough to envision a fifth person. We have been a tight group of four, knowing each other quite well. We can anticipate how each reacts and we have the bonds to both care about the others while also being free to oppose one another.

I have confidence in the person we hired, but it will take time to adjust.

We also hired a professional cleaner for bi-weekly cleanings. This has also been an adjustment.

Development

I have found this year to be difficult to work on my projects. I have added some to literate programming. I entered this winter break with the intention of redoing it, using Promises or perhaps Observables. But on looking at the options, I realized I love my Event-When paradigm. So I have spent the vacation trying to improve that, which is still a work in progress, but I am pretty happy with some of the innovations. It strikes me as the mental model that works well for me: events happen, stuff reacts to it. This is a bit silly in terms of scientific or mathematical computations (maybe), but for user interaction stuff, it is perfect. Even in the realm of math and science, events can be a way to break problems into separate computations.

My goals are to finish the Event-When rewrite, incorporate that into Literate-Programming and update all of that. With luck, I could get that done by May.

Once that is done, or perhaps concurrently, I intend to finally get my own blog system going and MathPebbles. So much to do and I still need to do A&I internal web stuff.

I am captivated by the ideas of mathematics and physics. I have been taking breaks from programming this vacation and retreating to reading mathematics. There is so much to explore and understand. This is what I hope to bring to MathPebbles. I think one idea for the site is to thread some pebbles together as a kind of companion to some good math books. I used to think of writing a math book, but there are plenty of those in existence. What is needed is a platform for exploring mathematics in a way that is most helpful to those learning. I absolutely love GeoGebra, WolframAlpha, Desmos, but they all strike me as giving answers while skipping much of the journey. I want to remove the burden of the manual computations, but facilitate stepping through the process rather than shortcutting it.

Family

Family has been good. My daughter is growing up fast. While only six, she seems much older. She has just lost her two front teeth. She is into Legos this year, working diligently in following the instructions of the sets. While I always enjoyed the free form method, I have to admit it is pretty cool to see the constructions she makes.

My parents are definitely getting older. We have had some conversations in trying to prepare for the inevitable, but I get the sense that when disaster finally strikes, I will be completely unprepared. I can't help but continue to think that our society is most failing the young and the old. Our lack of neighborly community, shall we say, hurts them the most.

I do worry that I spend too much time working on my projects when I should spend more time with my daughter and my parents.

My wife is going through her own journey. The new year may see some significant changes to our lives as she takes on a new direction.

Future

I am hoping this year will be pretty stable in terms of my jobs, devices, and time usage. My hope is to get MathPebbles going full blast along with finishing up Literate Programming and Event When. There are some internal projects at A&I to do as well as the RPG to run.

Each year, I hope to get further into my many projects. There are books and other projects I want to do, but I think the biggest desire is MathPebbles. So let's hope this is the year for that!

Sunday will be a day to declutter, clean, and refocus each week on the upcoming week. Discipline is the call to action.

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